As a followup to Part 1 (PubSub), and Part 2 (Feedster), here's the process and how to guide for being a NewsMaster. It may seem complicated and time consuming but once you get into the swing of things, it should take 1-1.5 hours per day and reduce the time you spend in boring, tedious, repetitive business development and let you focus on serving your existing customers better and help you attract new ones via the web faster.

• 1. Decide on your keywords or key phrases
  • preferably "googlewhacks", i.e. not a lot of hits on google or close to zero, that's why we chose bryght ; 'sms' for example is hard to get a high google rank on
  • these keywords will be used as blog categories and Google Alerts and RSS searches, so keep them brief
• 2. Subscribe to your Keywords and your company name and links to your website and that of your competitors and industry leading blogs and websites
  • use FeedDemon on Windows, NetNewsWire on Mac OS X
  • use PubSub [How to Use PubSub]
  • use Feedster [How to Use Feedster]
  • subscribe to the industry leading blogs if any (if there aren't any you are in luck, you can easily establish yourself as the authority for your industry!)
  • use Google Alerts for your keyword, your company name and your competitors' company names
  • this will give you stuff to blog about in addition to your company related stuff
  • it will also lead you to the best bloggers and sites in your industry
• 3. Use a Blog or Bryght site to participate in the blogosphere and the RSS conversational flow
  • create categories that correspond to your keywords and use them!
  • if you want a community with an RSS reader, multiple bloggers on one site, chat boards, event listings, photo galleries, and many more community features use a Bryght site (I'll add a link to our trial Bryght site creator when we go to open beta)
  • otherwise use a Blogware blog (surf to blogstore.streamlinewebco.com to create a 30 day FREE trial blog)
  • of course, there are plenty of other blog tools and hosted services :-) ! e.g. WordPress, TypePad, Manila, Radio, to name just a few!
  • create compelling content constantly (we recommend updating your blog 2-5 times a week)
    • become an industry authority in your vertical
    • link to stuff on your "normal" website as well as elsewhere on the web
    • make updating your blog a part of your daily business development, instead of sending out custom emails to leads and contacts, blog the common, public part and send emails with customer specific stuff at the front and a link (or cut and paste) to your blog where you have documented the public, common part
  • link to your competitors (Scoble's corporate weblog manifesto has more things you should do)
    • only companies who have insecurities about their products and services are afraid to send people away to other sites and to competitors (and anyway they are just a google search away)
  • mention your keywords in the blog post title and the blog text but don't do it gratuitously, do it where it makes sense and use categories
  • mention your blog in your email signature and in your offline business collateral e.g. business cards
  • respond to comments and trackbacks in a timely fashion
  • in the chat rooms and forums and blogs and websites or whereever else online your customers hang out (chances are the bloggers in your vertical and your PubSub and Feedster subscriptions will find these places), leave comments and links back to your blog where it makes sense and doesn't look like astroturfing
  • if there is a conference or blogger meetup (perhaps a blogging conference like NorthernVoice but more likely an industry conference) where your online peers are gathering, be there!
  • when you have good stuff, send an email with link to leading bloggers, and website 'site moms'
  • monitor your referers and see how people are getting to your site and what stuff is popular and blog more about it!
  • remember it takes time to build credibility and to get noticed and to get conversations going; it's not going to happen overnight, it may take months just like normal offline real world business development
• 4. It's not about referers, eyeballs or unique visitors it's about comments, trackbacks and links to your websites that allow you to develop an online relationship and conversation which results in leads which leads to $